The Heart of the Matter (32 page)

The door creaked gently open behind him. Scobie did not move. The spies, he thought, are creeping in. Is this Wilson, Harris, Pemberton’s boy, Ali …? ‘Massa,’ a voice whispered, and a bare foot slapped the concrete floor.

‘Who are you?’ Scobie asked not turning round. A pink palm dropped a small ball of paper on the table and went out of sight again. The voice said, ‘Yusef say come very quiet nobody see.’

‘What does Yusef want now?’

‘He send you dash—small small dash.’ Then the door closed again and silence was back. Loneliness said, ‘Let us open this together, you and I.’

Scobie picked up the ball of paper: It was light, but it had a small hard centre. At first he didn’t realize what it was: he thought it was a pebble put in to keep the paper steady and he looked for writing which, of course, was not there, for whom would Yusef trust to write for him? Then he realized what it was—a diamond, a gem stone. He knew nothing about diamonds, but it seemed to him that it was probably worth at least as much as his debt to Yusef. Presumably Yusef had information that the stones he had sent by the
Esperança
had reached their destination safely. This was a mark of gratitude—not a bribe, Yusef would explain, the fat hand upon his sincere and shallow heart.

The door burst open and there was Ali. He had a boy by the arm who whimpered. Ali said, ‘This stinking Mende boy he go all round the house. He try doors.’

‘Who are you?’ Scobie said.

The boy broke out in a mixture of fear and rage, ‘I Yusef’s boy. I bring Massa letter,’ and he pointed at the table where the pebble lay in the screw of paper. Ali’s eyes followed the gesture. Scobie said to his loneliness, ‘You and I have to think quickly.’ He turned on the boy and said, ‘Why you not come here properly and knock on the door? Why you come like a thief?’

He had the thin body and the melancholy soft eyes of all Mendes. He said, ‘I not a thief,’ with so slight an emphasis on the first word that it was just possible he was not impertinent. He went on, ‘Massa tell me to come very quiet.’

Scobie said, ‘Take this back to Yusef and tell him I want to know where he gets a stone like that. I think he steals stones and I find out by-and-by. Go on. Take it. Now, Ali, throw him out.’ Ali pushed the boy ahead of him through the door, and Scobie could hear the rustle of their feet on the path. Were they whispering together? He went to the door and called out after them, ‘Tell Yusef I call on him one night soon and make hell of a palaver.’ He slammed the door again and thought, what a lot Ali knows, and he felt distrust of his boy moving again like fever with the bloodstream. He could ruin me, he thought: he could ruin
them
.

He poured himself out a glass of whisky and took a bottle of soda out of his ice-box. Louise called from upstairs, ‘Henry.’

‘Yes, dear?’

‘Is it twelve yet?’

‘Close on, I think.’

‘You won’t drink anything after twelve, will you? You remember tomorrow?’ and of course he did remember, draining his glass: it was November the First—All Saints’ Day, and this All Souls’ Night. What ghost would pass over the whisky’s surface? ‘You are coming to communion, aren’t you, dear?’ and he thought wearily: there is no end to this: why should I draw the line now? One may as well go on damning oneself until the end. His loneliness was the only ghost his whisky could invoke, nodding across the table at him, taking a drink out of his glass. ‘The next occasion,’
loneliness
told him, ‘will be Christmas—the Midnight Mass—you won’t be able to avoid that you know, and no excuse will serve you on that night and after that’—the long chain of feast days, of early Masses in spring and summer, unrolled themselves like a perpetual calendar. He had a sudden picture before his eyes of a bleeding face, of eyes closed by the continuous shower of blows: the punch-drunk head of God reeling sideways.

‘You
are
coming, Ticki?’ Louise called with what seemed to him a sudden anxiety, as though perhaps suspicion had momentarily breathed on her again—and he thought again, can Ali really be trusted? and all the stale coast wisdom of the traders and the remittance men told him, ‘Never trust a black. They’ll let you down in the end. Had my boy fifteen years …’ The ghosts of distrust came out on All Souls’ Night and gathered around his glass.

‘Oh yes, my dear, I’m coming.’

‘You have only to say the word,’ he addressed God, ‘and legions of angels …’ and he struck with his ringed hand under the eye and saw the bruised skin break. He thought, ‘And again at Christmas,’ thrusting the Child’s face into the filth of the stable. He cried up the stairs, ‘What’s that you said, dear?’

‘Oh, only that we’ve got so much to celebrate tomorrow. Being together and the Commissionership. Life is so happy, Ticki.’ And that, he told his loneliness with defiance, is my reward, splashing the whisky across the table, defying the ghosts to do their worst, watching God bleed.

4

I

HE COULD TELL
that Yusef was working late in his office on the quay. The little white two-storeyed building stood beside the wooden jetty on the edge of Africa, just beyond the army dumps of petrol, and a line of light showed under the curtains of the landward window. A policeman saluted Scobie as he picked his way between the crates. ‘All quiet, corporal?’

‘All quiet, sah.’

‘Have you patrolled at the Kru Town end?’

‘Oh yes, sah. All quiet, sah.’ He could tell from the promptitude of the reply how untrue it was.

‘The wharf rats out?’

‘Oh no, sah. All very quiet like the grave.’ The stale literary phrase showed that the man had been educated at a mission school.

‘Well, good night.’

‘Good night, sah.’

Scobie went on. It was many weeks now since he had seen Yusef—not since the night of the blackmail, and now he felt an odd yearning towards his tormentor. The little white building magnetized him, as though concealed there was his only companionship, the only man he could trust. At least his blackmailer knew him as no one else did: he could sit opposite that fat absurd figure and tell the whole truth. In this new world of lies his blackmailer was at home: he knew the paths: he could advise: even help … Round the corner of a crate came Wilson. Scobie’s torch lit his face like a map.

‘Why, Wilson,’ Scobie said, ‘you are out late.’

‘Yes,’ Wilson said, and Scobie thought uneasily, how he hates me.

‘You’ve got a pass for the quay?’

‘Yes.’

‘Keep away from the Kru Town end. It’s not safe there alone. No more nose bleeding?’

‘No,’ Wilson said. He made no attempt to move; it seemed always his way—to stand blocking a path: a man one had to walk round.

‘Well, I’ll be saying good night, Wilson. Look in any time. Louise …’

Wilson said, ‘I love her, Scobie.’

‘I thought you did,’ Scobie said. ‘She likes you, Wilson.’

‘I love her,’ Wilson repeated. He plucked at the tarpaulin over the crate and said, ‘You wouldn’t know what that means.’

‘What means?’

‘Love. You don’t love anybody except yourself, your dirty self.’

‘You are overwrought, Wilson. It’s the climate. Go and lie down.’

‘You wouldn’t act as you do if you loved her.’ Over the black tide, from an invisible ship, came the sound of a gramophone playing some popular heart-rending tune. A sentry by the Field Security post challenged and somebody replied with a password. Scobie lowered his torch till it lit only Wilson’s mosquito-boots. He said, ‘Love isn’t as simple as you think it is, Wilson. You read too much poetry.’

‘What would you do if I told her everything—about Mrs Rolt?’

‘But you have told her, Wilson. What you believe. But she prefers my story.’

‘One day I’ll ruin you, Scobie.’

‘Would that help Louise?’

‘I could make her happy,’ Wilson claimed ingenuously, with a breaking voice that took Scobie back over fifteen years—to a much younger man than this soiled specimen who listened to Wilson at the sea’s edge, hearing under the words the low sucking of water against wood. He said gently, ‘You’d try. I know you’d try. Perhaps …’ but he had no idea himself how that sentence was supposed to finish, what vague comfort for Wilson had brushed his mind and gone again. Instead an irritation took him against the gangling romantic figure by the crate who was so ignorant and yet knew so much. He said, ‘I wish meanwhile you’d stop spying on me.’

‘It’s my job.’ Wilson admitted, and his boots moved in the torchlight.

‘The things you find out are so unimportant.’ He left Wilson beside the petrol dump and walked on. As he climbed the steps to Yusef’s office he could see, looking back, an obscure thickening of the darkness where Wilson stood and watched and hated. He would go home and draft a report. ‘At 11.25 I observed Major Scobie going obviously by appointment …’

Scobie knocked and walked right in where Yusef half lay behind his desk, his legs upon it, dictating to a black clerk. Without breaking his sentence—‘five hundred rolls matchbox design, seven hundred and fifty bucket and sand, six hundred poker dot artificial silk’—he looked up at Scobie with hope and apprehension. Then he said sharply to the clerk, ‘Get out. But come back. Tell my boy that I see no one.’ He took his legs from the desk, rose and held out a flabby hand, ‘Welcome, Major Scobie,’ then let it fall like an unwanted piece of material. ‘This is the first time you have ever honoured my office, Major Scobie.’

‘I don’t know why I’ve come here now, Yusef.’

‘It is a long time since we have seen each other.’ Yusef sat down and rested his great head wearily on a palm like a dish. ‘Time goes so differently for two people—fast or slow. According to their friendship.’

‘There’s probably a Syrian poem about that.’

‘There is, Major Scobie,’ he said eagerly.

‘You should be friends with Wilson, not me, Yusef. He reads poetry. I have a prose mind.’

‘A whisky, Major Scobie?’

‘I wouldn’t say no.’ He sat down on the other side of the desk and the inevitable blue syphon stood between them.

‘And how is Mrs Scobie?’

‘Why did you send me that diamond, Yusef?’

‘I was in your debt, Major Scobie.’

‘Oh no, you weren’t. You paid me off in full with a bit of paper.’

‘I try so hard to forget that that was the way. I tell myself it was really friendship—at bottom it was friendship.’

‘It’s never any good lying to oneself, Yusef. One sees through the lie too easily.’

‘Major Scobie, if I saw more of you, I should become a better man.’ The soda hissed in the glasses and Yusef drank greedily. He said, ‘I can feel in my heart, Major Scobie, that you are anxious, depressed … I have always wished that you would come to me in trouble.’

Scobie said, ‘I used to laugh at the idea—that I should ever come to you.’

‘In Syria we have a story of a lion and a mouse …’

‘We have the same story, Yusef. But I’ve never thought of you as a mouse, and I’m no lion. No lion.’

‘It is about Mrs Rolt you are troubled. And your wife, Major Scobie?’

‘Yes.’

‘You do not need to be ashamed with me, Major Scobie. I have had much woman trouble in my life. Now it is better because I have learned the way. The way is not to care a damn, Major Scobie. You say to each of them, “I do not care a damn. I sleep with whom I please. You take me or leave me. I do not care a damn.” They always take you, Major Scobie.’ He sighed into his whisky. ‘Sometimes I have wished they would not take me.’

‘I’ve gone to great lengths, Yusef, to keep things from my wife.’

‘I know the lengths you have gone, Major Scobie.’

‘Not the whole length. The business with the diamonds was very small compared …’

‘Yes?’

‘You wouldn’t understand. Anyway somebody else knows now—Ali.’

‘But you trust Ali?’

‘I think I trust him. But he knows about you too. He came in last night and saw the diamond there. Your boy was very indiscreet.’

The big broad hand shifted on the table. ‘I will deal with my boy presently.’

‘Ali’s half-brother is Wilson’s boy. They see each other.’

‘That is certainly bad,’ Yusef said.

He had told all his worries now—all except the worst. He had the odd sense of having for the first time in his life shifted a burden elsewhere. And Yusef carried it—he obviously carried it. He raised himself from his chair and now moved his great haunches
to
the window, staring at the green black-out curtain as though it were a landscape. A hand went up to his mouth and he began to bite his nails—snip, snip, snip, his teeth closed on each nail in turn. Then he began on the other hand. ‘I don’t suppose it’s anything to worry about really,’ Scobie said. He was touched by uneasiness, as though he had accidentally set in motion a powerful machine he couldn’t control.

‘It is a bad thing not to trust,’ Yusef said. ‘One must always have boys one trusts. You must always know more about them than they do about you.’ That, apparently, was his conception of trust. Scobie said, ‘I used to trust him.’

Yusef looked at his trimmed nails and took another bite. He said, ‘Do not worry. I will not have you worry. Leave everything to me, Major Scobie. I will find out for you whether you can trust him.’ He made the startling claim, ‘I will look after you.’

‘How can you do that?’ I feel no resentment, he thought with weary surprise. I am being looked after, and a kind of nursery peace descended.

‘You mustn’t ask me questions, Major Scobie. You must leave everything to me just this once. I understand the way.’ Moving from the window Yusef turned on Scobie eyes like closed telescopes, blank and brassy. He said with a soothing nurse’s gesture of the broad wet palm, ‘You will just write a little note to your boy, Major Scobie. asking him to come here. I will talk to him. My boy will take it to him.’

‘But Ali can’t read.’

‘Better still then. You will send some token with my boy to show that he comes from you. Your signet ring.’

‘What are you going to do, Yusef?’

‘I am going to help you, Major Scobie. That is all.’ Slowly, reluctantly, Scobie drew at his ring. He said, ‘He’s been with me fifteen years. I always have trusted him until now.’